29) Trump is NOT STABLE: He is a Pathological Liar

During the 2016 Republican Primaries and Before, Trump’s Compulsive Lying Was Visible to Many. He Won Anyway.

When Trump viciously lied about Senator Ted Cruz’s father during the Republican 2016 Primary Campaigns, Cruz complained in a May 3 press conference. He continued his remarks with an extremely honest an insightful commentary on Trump, the man that has come to dominate the news media during the last nine years. He called Donald Trump a pathological liar (true), a serial philanderer (true), and a man who falsely accuses others of the very things he is rightfully accused of (true). He wondered how we would feel during the next 5 years, with our children emulating his traits like bullying. Listen to Cruz (3 minutes):

Unfortunately Cruz went from that state of truth to campaigning for Donald Trump in the fall of 2016. And even though his darkest predictions about Trump came true, when the election campaign of 2020 took place, Cruz supported Trump and voted for him (presumably). And now, four years later, Cruz is once again supporting Donald Trump. It is beyond comprehension and it mirrors the great number of other “Christians” of all stripes who have likewise abandoned their values.

Types of Lies

Bella DePaulo Ph.D., an academic, studied people’s lying habits, including how often they lied and what types of lies they used. Writing in Psychology Today (December 9, 2017 edition) she said she and her colleagues determined there were mainly two types of lies: “(1) Self-serving lies help liars get what they want and avoid what they don’t want; they help liars look or feel better, and spare liars from blame or embarrassment they don’t want to experience. (2) Kind lies are the same, only they are told for someone else’s benefit. When people lie to help you get what you want, or make you look or feel better, or protect you from something you don’t want, they are telling you a kind lie.”

“In my previous studies,” she wrote, “I found that people tell about twice as many self-serving lies as kind lies.”

When she studied his known lies up to the time the article was written for PT, she wondered if that norm would apply to Trump.

Instead, she wrote “he told 6.6 times as many self-serving lies as kind lies.”

Dr. DePaulo continued, “Now let me tell you what I found when I tallied Trump’s cruel lies. Instead of adding up to 1 or 2 percent, as in my previous research, they accounted for 50 percent. When I first saw that number appear on my screen, I gasped. I knew, of course, that Trump likes to mock and denigrate other people (and countries and agencies), but I didn’t realize just how often he was doing that with his lies.”

Clearly Dr DePaulo knows how much the average person lies and what types of lies the average person tells. Trump’s lies are not normal in any way – not in the number of lies or types of lies.

Tracking ALL the Many Lies

I think it is well known that the Washington Post, after hearing Trump’s many lies during the 2016 election campaign, decided to keep a running total throughout Trump’s four-year presidency. In the final report, the Post wrote:

When The Washington Post Fact Checker team first started cataloguing President Donald Trump’s false or misleading claims, we recorded 492 suspect claims in the first 100 days of his presidency. On Nov. 2 alone, the day before the 2020 vote, Trump made 503 false or misleading claims as he barnstormed across the country in a desperate effort to win reelection.

This astonishing jump in falsehoods is the story of Trump’s tumultuous reign. By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency — averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day.

What is especially striking is how the tsunami of untruths kept rising the longer he served as president and became increasingly unmoored from the truth.

Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in this third year — and 39 claims a day in his final year. Put another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and an additional 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later.

Chief of Staff, With Trump Continuously for 17 Months

Gen. John F. Kelly, Trump’s Chief of Staff beginning on July 31, 2017 and continuing for 17 months is quoted in the Guardian (9/15/22) as saying he “came to consider Trump to be a pathological liar whose inflated ego was in fact the sign of a deeply insecure person.”

Dangerous Lies and Pointless Lies

According to Bess Levin, in a Vanity Fair “Report” (10/4/22), the lying continues. She says that “prior to the FBI raiding his home at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, and uncovering numerous classified documents, Trump wanted one of his attorneys to lie to the government and say he’d returned it all. … despite the fact that he was still in possession of thousands more government documents.”

She marvels that “every time [Trump] opens his mouth, dozens of lies fly out like the monkeys in The Wizard of Oz. Sometimes the lies are big and offensive, like when he declared, on 9/11, that one of the buildings he owned in NYC was now the tallest in Manhattan on account of the Twin Towers being leveled. Other times the lies are minor and largely pointless, like his oft-repeated claim that he’d been named Michigan’s ‘Man of the Year,’ despite the fact that this award does not exist.”

“The lies have been deranged, like when he quintupled down on the one that Alabama was going to be hit by a hurricane; they’ve been dangerous, like when he lied about COVID-19; and they’ve been legitimately insane, like when he said that Ivanka Trump had created 14 million jobs, despite the fact that the country had only added roughly 6 million during her time at the White House.”

Nothing Has Changed

Jennifer Rubin, a frequent commentator observed on Washington Post Live (6/28/24, following the Biden-Trump debate): “What we saw [in the debate], was essentially what we knew. Which is, President Biden is old. We also know that President Trump is just a compulsive liar. We say it so frequently that it loses its power that politicians lie, but this was in a class by itself. When he blamed Nancy Pelosi for January 6, when he rants on and on about illegal immigrants getting on social security, this is crazy pants stuff.”

But Don’t All Presidents Lie?

Sure, all Presidents have lied to us. But Trump’s lying is far more in volume, far more insidious. Eric Alterman addresses this in his book: Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie — and Why Trump Is Worse.

[The following is a PR description for the book. I have not read it, but it looks intriguing.]

This definitive history of presidential lying reveals how our standards for truthfulness have eroded — and why Trump’s lies are especially dangerous.

If there’s one thing we know about Donald Trump, it’s that he lies. But he’s by no means the first president to do so. In Lying in State, Eric Alterman asks how we ended up with such a pathologically dishonest commander in chief, showing that, from early on, the United States has persistently expanded its power and hegemony on the basis of presidential lies. He also reveals the cumulative effect of this deception-each lie a president tells makes it more acceptable for subsequent presidents to lie-and the media’s complicity in spreading misinformation. Donald Trump, then, represents not an aberration but the culmination of an age-old trend.

My Thoughts: We Are in Dangerous Times Due to His Lies

Donald Trump has brought us a bewildering world of double-speak. After years of lies, after listening to the President of the United States constantly berating the work of solid journalists with the label “fake news,” after being told the most amazingly false information as though it were true, Americans’ capacity for sifting for the truth has been diminished. I am convinced he is a danger to the country.

If American citizens are bewildered, it is even more dangerous that our allies and potential enemies have no idea of whether Trump is telling the truth or whether he even knows what the truth is. Again, this is dangerous!

Even now, Trump, J. D. Vance and their allies are spreading a very dangerous lie. Check this 2 minute video:

Final Clarification

Though many observers (even myself) have used the term “pathological liar” as though it were in itself a mental illness, technically, pathological lying is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), only as a symptom of other disorders such as antisocial, narcissistic, and histrionic personality disorders, not as a stand-alone diagnosis. [Wikipedia]. I plan to address Trump’s narcissistic personality disorder in the next few days. Because Donald Trump is not a stable person, let alone a stable genius.